The After Coal team visited with Victoria Winckler, Director of the Bevan Foundation at the Ebbw Vale Steel Works in Wales. Two miles of buildings that once employed 10,000 people are now the site of a massive regeneration effort. A new hospital, college, and eco-friendly housing units are all part of the plan for the once bustling valley. Winckler explained that the Bevan Foundation seeks solutions to poverty and social exclusion through research, idea exchanges, and public policy recommendations. Her perspective on regeneration outlines the complex decision making that faces community leaders and policy makers in deindustrialized places.
Victoria Winckler, Director of the Bevan Foundation.
Winckler:“Regeneration is one of those words that means a lot of different things depending on who you talk to. On one extreme, regeneration can be described as ethical property development. So, you would take a rundown area (very often an urban area) and provide a mixture of incentives and public sector support. You attract private investment, then and lo and behold, property values shoot up. It might look nice, but there is a big question mark about whether local people have actually benefited from that.
There’s then a kind of middle ground where the public sector might be trying to attract businesses to relocate to an area. This approach also uses the mixture of public incentives. It can actually be really important if you’ve got an area that has had massive decline, because it shows that these places do have potential and can be a decent place to do business.
Ebbw Vale Works.
And then there is the third element of regeneration, that is commonly used in Wales, and that’s community and social regeneration. We believe that regeneration, or any sort of change, only happens when people change. Our people have had a lot of difficulty adjusting to the process of deindustrialization. A lot of social relationships have been really damaged by that process, both within families but also between neighbors in communities. In Wales there is a widely held belief that the way you get social and economic change is if communities themselves argue for it and campaign for it. This means regeneration has to be a real bottom up movement.
Ebbw Vale Works.
If you have almost all of the community working in a coal mine, when the coal mine closes, there’s nothing. Our take on that is that it’s a matter of social justice. We don’t think that people should necessarily get up and move, or that the fact that they’re unemployed is because they’re lazy or work shy, or unskilled or stupid, or any of those things that are said about people who have lost their jobs. Our view is that the employers have taken jobs away in pursuit of bigger profits elsewhere, and that caring for people and making sure people have a decent quality of life is a collective responsibility and one that is a hallmark of a decent and civilized society.”
“Communities in Appalachia and Wales can play a really important part in the movement for rethinking what we mean by economic development.” — John Gaventa
John Gaventa started a video exchange between coal miners in Appalachia and Wales in 1974. The After Coal project owes a huge debt to his groundbreaking work. Gaventa is currently director of the Coady International Institute at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.
We were lucky to catch him in Virginia last week and record an interview for After Coal. Here is a glimpse at his thoughts:
Producer Pat Beaver interviews John Gaventa in Virginia.
“Change is an inevitable part of mining communities. This doesn’t mean that we give up on these communities. It means we need to think about using local strengths to create a different kind of sustainable economy. The question is not: Coal versus no coal. The question is: How do we use community assets such as leadership, experience, resilience, and skills to create something different.”
The After Coal team was excited to participate in the Appalachia’s Bright Future Conference in Harlan, Kentucky from April 19-21. Mair and Hywel Francis traveled from Wales to Appalachia for the occasion, continuing the exchange of lessons and stories among coal communities. Enjoy some photos we snapped that help tell the story of the weekend.
The Harlan Convention Center, site of the Appalachia’s Bright Future Conference.
Main Street, Harlan Kentucky.
After Coal project advisor Mair Francis speaks, Appalachia’s Bright Future Conference.
Katey Lauer asks a question at the After Coal panel, Appalachia’s Bright Future Conference.
Art installation by Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Chris Owen at Appalachia’s Bright Future conference.
After Coal project director Tom Hansell introduces the panel at the Appalachia’s Bright Future Conference.
Mine Supply Building, Harlan, Kentucky.
After Coal project advisor Helen Lewis and her famous truck.
Clover Fork of the Cumberland River, Brookside, Kentucky.
Retired Miners Rutland Melton and Carl Shoupe participate in a discussion about workers and economic transition at the Appalachia’s Bright Future conference.
“It looks to me as if the history of the coal industry in Kentucky has followed the same lines as the coal industry in Wales. We’ve all had a hard time.” — Terry Thomas, former Vice-President of National Union of Mine Workers in Wales
Carl Shoupe and Terry Thomas experienced the boom and bust of the coal industry on different continents in the late twentieth century. In the fall of 2012, former union leader Thomas traveled nearly 4,000 miles from the South Wales coalfields to “Bloody Harlan”, Kentucky. As Shoupe and Thomas walked through the town of Benham, Kentucky, they let their conversation wander like the curving roads of Appalachia. Their conversation continued a cultural exchange spanning decades — from the bitter mine strikes of the 1970’s to a period of uncertain transition on both sides of the Atlantic. The discussion circled back to the need for community- based regeneration in coalfields.
Terry Thomas of Wales and Carl Shoupe of Kentucky meet in Appalachia, 2012.
Memories of Union Struggle:
Shoupe: You’re in what they call Harlan County, Kentucky. This is one of the ground fights…for the union. Its literally called “Bloody Harlan”…they had a union organizing drive going on here at the little town of Benham. The UMWA [United Mine Workers of America] organizers came in like a convoy, had a bunch of cars, and the company guards had a machine gun set up in the top of that commissary down there.
Most of Harlan County’s coal mines had a union presence, with violent clashes spanning decades. Thomas’ work in Wales was similarly embedded in the union struggle for fair wages and safe working conditions.
Thomas: The labour government was elected in 1974 during the miner’s strike, and the miners did win that strike, and they gained a great deal. But it was only temporary, because when Thatcher got elected in 1979, she was preparing all the time to really destroy the miners. In 1984 the miners would come out on strike because of what Thatcher was doing to the coal industry. We were on strike for a whole 12 months.
In the aftermath of the 1984 strike, the coal industry was privatized and the South Wales coalfields experienced devastating job loss with closure of collieries. However, this was not the only challenge for the once humming valleys.
Thomas: The latest crisis, the latest economic crisis, is a financial crisis caused by the bankers, caused by greed of the bankers. But who’s paying the price for that again? It is people in communities such as this paying the price..for the depression that was caused by the banks.
Shoupe: It’s all about the laboring class of people and we’re the ones that get left.
Thomas: The only thing that our people want is a good job to go to and be paid a fair wage for that job. They don’t ask for much, just enough to raise their families. They don’t want millions. Just enough to keep them from day to day, happy and healthy, and that’s not much to ask for in this world.
South Wales Mining Museum.
Ready to Fight for a Brighter Future:
Thomas: If I tell you this, after the 1984-85 miner strike. We in Britain, we lost 85,000 mining jobs. At one time, I’m going back in history, back in 1919 there were almost a quarter of a million miners working in South Wales alone. Now as we’re talking now, we’ve got about 600.
Across the ocean, tiny Benham was home to over 10,000 people during the coal boom. In 2012, only 800 people remain. Yet projects like the conversion of the old high school into an inn, the refurbishing of the movie theater, and celebration of mining history through tours of Portal 31 coal mine in nearby Lynch demonstrate local residents’ hope for the future.
Wales has explored similar regeneration, forced to begin a few decades ahead of Appalachia. In Wales, only about 600 mining jobs remain, and communities struggle as they adjust to the new economy. Mining museums and efforts at tourism provide service industry jobs where industrial work once reigned. Back on the sleepy streets of Benham, Shoupe worries about the survival of his town. Both men grapple with the lingering threads of an industry in decline. In the aftermath of deep mining in Appalachia, surface mines and mountain top removal threaten landscapes and water sources, while employing fewer and fewer people.
Thomas: You talk about that mountain over there now. If the coal company comes in, takes the top of that mountain off, once they’ve got what they want they’ll be gone. They will forget about the community. That has been what we’ve seen in the past. They come in, they take out what they want and go, and leave the people in the community behind. What we have to do is to make sure that whatever happens in the community is done with the community needs in mind. We have to find a way of doing that.
Shoupe: It’s universal, but these kids, nowadays Terry, they might have to, I hope not, they might have to learn the old hard way.
Thomas: They’re going to have to learn to fight, not in the same way maybe as we had to do it. There are different ways to do it, but they’re going to have to learn to fight for their communities.
Shoupe: It’s all about organization and standing together, you know? United we stand, you know? That’s true, that’s so true.
Appalachian Mountains.
Carl Shoupe hails from Lynch, Kentucky, a company coal town in Harlan County. “You went in and mined the coal and they paid you a wage, but that wage just kept circling around, circling around. You didn’t get anything.” If the cycle of coal production didn’t suit you, there weren’t many other options. The towns in these eastern Kentucky valleys were built on the bedrock of industrial coal.
Terry Thomas is a former miner from the South Wales coalfields. “I first went in [to the mines] in 1960. I went underground to work in Wales, almost from the start of my time there I became involved in the miner’s union. I became the branch sector of the local mine.” Thomas went on to become the Vice President of the Union in Wales, coordinating strikes and negotiations until the end of the bitter 1984-1985 strike.
New statistics released by the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet show a staggering drop in coal production and a sharp rise in unemployment in the southeastern coalfields, particularly in Letcher, Harlan, Knott and Perry counties. According to the report, “Eastern Kentucky coal production decreased in 2012 by 27.6 percent from 2011 to 49.4 million tons — the lowest level since 1965. Eastern Kentucky production has declined by 53.5 percent since the year 2000, and by 62.3 percent since peaking at 131 million tons in 1990.”
Over 4,000 eastern Kentucky miners have lost their jobs since 2011, and many fear the coal jobs aren’t coming back, leaving many to ask the question, what comes next? Scholars at Appalachian State University think there are lessons to be learned from South Wales, a major coal producing region which faced a similar decline over a quarter century ago. WMMT’s Sylvia Ryerson has this report.
After Coal: Welsh and Appalachian Mining Communities is a documentary in progress. This article, published in the Daily Yonder, offers context to the project. Enjoy!
by Tom Hansell and Patricia Beaver
“Communities always change, industries come and go. It was foolish of us to think at the end of the 1985 miners strike that it was the end of the world – it was an opportunity for a new beginning” – Hywel Francis, Member of Parliament representing former Welsh mining valleys.
What happens when fossil fuels run out? How do rural communities reinvent themselves as natural resources are depleted?
In the Appalachian mountains, where coal mining is projected to decline dramatically this decade some people are looking to Wales for answers. The challenges to Wales and Appalachia in recent decades are tragically similar. The Welsh coalfields were mostly shut down in the 1980’s, with a loss of more than 85,000 jobs.
Meanwhile, the Appalachian coalfields lost over 70,000 mining jobs between 1980 and 2000 according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). A June 2012 EIA report projects that Appalachian coal production will be cut in half this decade. Former mining communities in Wales have 30 years experience with regenerating local economies. By comparing and contrasting the Welsh and Appalachian experience with coal, we are examining the human costs of de-industrialization, and asking “what’s next for these rural communities?”
Wales and Coal
Wales is about the size of the state of New Jersey, and the coalfields cover the southern quarter of the country. These twenty narrow valleys were the cradle of the industrial revolution. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Welsh factories began to produce iron, steel, and tin. Welsh coal reserves fired the rising industrial order. By the turn of the twentieth century the population of the mining towns had exploded and more than one quarter of the workforce worked in coal. Historian John Davies writes that in 1914, more than 230,000 men were employed by the coal industry in 485 pits across South Wales.
After World War II, all coal mines in the United Kingdom were nationalized – along with the rail, steel, and utility industries. The intent of nationalization was to set up a system that would use Britain’s resources to benefit the British people as a whole, rather than a small number of mine owners or shareholders. Nationalization was a goal of Britain’s growing Labour Party, and the National Union of Mineworkers carried considerable political clout. Globalization
During the 1970’s and 1980’s, ownership of coal and other energy resources consolidated, as multinational energy conglomerates bought up mining companies around the world. During this period of time, the nationalized coal industry in the UK faced tough competition from companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, which owned mines in South Africa. At the time Royal Dutch Shell also held a controlling interest in the A.T. Massey coal company, which had extensive holdings in Appalachia. In both Wales and Appalachia the globalization of the coal industry had a devastating impact on coal mining communities, as the 1980’s saw bitter strikes where union miners fought to keep well paying jobs in both Welsh and Appalachian mining communities.
The result of the strikes in Wales was privatization of the coal industry, a dramatic decline in the number of jobs, and the final disappearance of coal mining from much of the area. In his book History on Our Side, Hywel Francis describes that after the strikes, the shut down of mines in the Welsh mining valleys felt apocalyptic: “In such remote communities, the closures of schools and libraries, the end of bus services, the demolition of houses, the loss of a doctor from a practice, even the disappearance of a telephone kiosk, were all cumulative symptoms of a long-term decline. But this last rundown of colliery closures severed the surviving link with an industry that had given birth to these communities barely a century before.”
In both the US and the UK, miners’ unions (and all of organized labor) lost wages and influence after the strikes of the 1980’s. However, in Wales, the 1984-1985 miners’ strike laid the groundwork for community regeneration.
Community Education
One example of Welsh efforts to reinvent their rural economy is the DOVE Workshop.DOVE stands for the Dulais Opportinity for Voluntary Enterprise. Located in the village of Banwen at the head of the Dulais Valley, DOVE was started by a group of women who came together during the 1984 – 1985 miners strike. These women understood that the coal industry would no longer provide large-scale employment in their communities, and decided that community-based education was the most practical path to regenerate the local economy. Setting up shop in an abandoned mine office, they developed a series of adult education workshops for women. Three decades later, the DOVE building hosts a diverse set of small-scale entrepreneurs, including a daycare, library, a community garden, and a café featuring local foods.
Environmental Reclamation
By the 1990s, the British government had finally begun to propose the Valleys Initiative to initiate new and diverse jobs, as well as environmental and community improvements in the former mining valleys. Reclamation of abandoned mine sites became a cornerstone of the Welsh strategy for regeneration. Former miner and union leader Terry Thomas says: “If you look at the pits where I worked today, you would never know a mine was there. Now that reclamation is complete, you can’t recognize the place.”
Tourism
In the Afan valley, government efforts turned thousands of acres of abandoned mines into a mountain bike park and the South Wales miners museum. Visitor Center manager Leigh Acetson says the two attractions bring 120,000 visitors to the former mining valley each year.
Mountain bikers gather outside of the bike shop at the Glyncorrwg Visitors Center. Tourism has become part of economic development plans.
Together with tourism initiatives centered around national parks and other sites such as Mine Heritage museums, many government efforts seemed designed to attract wealthy visitors to the region. While this form of ecotourism does provide opportunity for small businesses, Terry Thomas points out: “Much of the employment that has been created is low paid minimum wage employment, in service industries, in place of well paid manufacturing industries.”
This focus on the service economy has made economic recovery in the Welsh coalfields a slow process. Still, many resourceful entrepreneurs are finding a way. Geraint Lewis left a corporate job in the city to return home to the former mining town of Seven Sisters in the Dulais Valley. Back in his hometown, Lewis started Call of the Wild. At first glance, Call of the Wild appears to be an ecotourism company, leading youth and adults on outdoor adventures such as hiking, rafting, and repelling. However, to avoid the pitfalls of the seasonal tourism industry, Lewis deliberately created a leadership development business, providing services for a range of corporate clients and offering year round employment at a living wage for local people.
Lewis says: “We wanted to start this training and development company using the outdoors as our classroom, but there was nobody doing it in the South Wales Coalfield. We had a lot of raised eyebrows from business consultants and bank managers…but we persevered, and I think we succeeded very quickly.” Today, Call of the Wild has more than 30 year round employees and owns pubs in the former mining village of Seven Sisters and Ystradglynlais.
Conclusions
There is no magic bullet to economic recovery in coal mining regions. Former mining communities in the Welsh Valleys are doing better than the 1980’s, but population has dropped and employment remains low. The first step to regeneration was “greening the valleys” – government programs to clean up mine waste piles, acid mine drainage, and other sources of pollution. Naturally, government resources are required for large-scale reclamation to be successful. In order for government to be effective, rural people need to be actively involved in the process of government. This means that grassroots organizing is an important element of economic regeneration. The longest lasting initiatives in Wales involve local people creating their own programs to meet community needs, such as the DOVE Workshop in Banwen.
Perhaps most importantly, the topic of energy is still an intensely debated issue. In some areas coal is making a small resurgence – the latest figures have between 800 and 1000 miners working in Wales. Meanwhile, energy corporations and the Welsh government have made a huge commitment to wind power – spinning turbines are commonplace above the former mining valleys. The government has partnered with private power companies to develop these wind farms and is now exploring large-scale tidal power.
On the surface this all sounds good. However, these former mining communities have well founded concerns about outside corporations developing local energy resources without investing in the community. When residents of the former Welsh mining valleys look at proposals for industrial scale wind farms from multinational energy corporations, many wonder when these corporations will pull out, leaving communities to fend for themselves once again.
